Why in the Hell should this movie win the first ever indieroar comedy competition?
Obviously, I am biased, but I do think the case can be made for making Mr. Hell the first ever winner in the comedy division. Looking around, I can see I am uniquely qualified to make the argument for this movie is funnier and better made than my honorable competition.
First and foremost, Indieroar is a beautiful virginal film festival. I am the first and only one here to publically walk up and say, “just imagine how much more beautiful you would be with me in you.” I want the award and I want the money and I am willing to say why my movie is better than the competition. Further, I absolutely do not know you or anyone involved in this competition. My winning would give this competition a guaranteed legitimacy. Saying you are going to award thousands in cash is one thing, doing it is another. I think this contest is real and am proceeding accordingly.
Personally, I think it is somewhat tragic that I am the only one in this competition who is maintaining a blog. The whole point of a festival is not only to show your work, but also chat it up a bit. Bottom line is, as far as I can tell, I am the only one who has watched and commented on every one of the movies in competition. I will say that my girlie woman is a Professor of Medicine at UCSF and a good chunk of the movies in this competition as a whole were filmed there. By kids with life-threatening diseases. So for my fellow film makers not to say something (I’m giving the kids a pass) more than a little sucks. Part of the inspiration for this contest is to create a community and it looks like just about everyone here is a SF Bay Area type.
Mr. Hell is something of a dinosaur, which makes it even more relevant to today’s hd on demand internet world. It is an independent roar from an analog by-gone age. But we are still talking about, gays, blacks, abortions, the Kennedy’s, and everyone is a racist Nazi. That it was shot at all, was something of a miracle. Why didn’t I green-screen it? Didn’t exist. It was something I had laying in a crate somewhere, kinda like, “When We Were Kings.” It really comes down to what counts as “Independent.” This is a hand-made movie. I’m competing against kids with a world famous hospital set and two small, well financed, film-crew armies. The reason this I can compete is because the rules of acquisition and distribution have changed. Mr. Hell is a beast from below. Ideas that would never get past the studio gate keepers are cheerfully and readily available.
Subject-wise, it is the story of someone who can cheerfully exist in Hollywood by spreading bigotry and hate. Namely, Hell-incarnate. And he is being honored at a film festival in France. By definition the movie should look god-awful and it succeeds in doing so. The title of Mr. Hell’s movie, “Lovely Lesbians,” is taken from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. In the book, Miller claims to be, “spitting in the face of art.” Mr. Hell is a spit against the worst of commercial Hollywood and unapologetically so. It sets a bar. It does not strive for a safe mediocrity.
Another reason I should win this award is it will make making the feature, Memes War – think, as you like it, meets The Omen – only this time it’s the New Testament, go that much more smoothly – and the business plan that goes along with it.
And of course, at its heart, Mr. Hell is a comedic horror story. Horror movies should make you laugh, and comedy should contain an element of horror. The distinction was best put by Mel Brooks, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall into a sewer and die.”
As far as my worthy competition is concerned, Enter the Realm of Adventure is my favorite and represents a kind of Chaplin-esque quality that I admire. It is a kind of comedy that is difficult to achieve and I respect it, but I want something with more adult teeth. No doubt the school system will get a hold of the little genius’s and crush them, but whoever helped them knew exactly when to stop them. It is exactly the right length. But Five or even one thousand to two kids for knocking over some books, if they were over in the animation section, I’d consider giving them second, but probably not.
Next up, Fishboy. I did like the use of “Evergreen” by Streisand and Williams, but by 11 minutes I’m thinking, by minute, 12 the old Jewish stereotype is a deadman. I had to watch it twice to figure out it, for some reason the girlfriend tied up the Mermaid. In Mr. Hell, Job strangles Hell, raging against god, thus loosing the bet for god. Such are the lengths the devil will go to to corrupt a man’s soul and turn him to hate.
In Fishboy, he presumably goes off to drown, while his girlfriend does what to the mermaid exactly? Another SF film-maker (I’m starting to notice a trend here) making exactly the kind of comedy I basically hate. The lack of the obligatory comedic vomit did throw me until I realized the movie was made several years ago. If it was made today, instead of waking up in the truck, he’d vomit. Hilarity ensues.
I will say it surprises me a film like this was somehow able to get the rights to Streisand academy award winning song and play it for giggles. Someone with that kind of pull and connections seems to hardly qualify as an indie. It started strong, but it was ultimately a one joke movie.
How to be popular is the real competition and let me begin by asking you to not email my fellow movie-makers. Basic disclaimer, I read the NYT article when it first came out, my girlfriend was raised in Westport, and I’m going there next week end so she can have her hair cut. Really. Life was much happier when the film maker couldn’t get his movie to encode, and while going toe to toe with the SF State Film department warms the heart, as a BCA grad, I do know how cliquish that department was and assume still is.
The interesting thing about this movie and the article is neither seem to be familiar with one of the most famous quote in evolutionary anthropology, “now I know why no one studies adolescent girls, they are too horrible.” In short, How to be Popular, isn’t a comedy, not even a little.
To examine this, lets jump back to the time I first saw the Terminator on the big screen. I went with a bunch of SF Film students, and they cheered on the Acting, the editing, the lighting, the cinematography, the direction, and so on. My film maker roommate said, “you are strangely silent, Impett, what do you think about the movie?” “Well,” I said, “it’s kind of hard for me to believe I liked a science fiction movie that much that Harlan Ellison didn’t have anything to do with.” I was roundly mocked. Watch the movie today and The Terminator does indeed acknowledge the works of Harlan Ellison – specifically, two Outer Limits episodes, The Soldier and The Demon with the Glass Hand. Cameron is a thief, abet a very talented one. Once you get past the scenes he lifted for the Abyss, not so bad. Nothing to say about Titanic other than my great aunt died on it.
Fast forward to Avatar, and I knew it was reasonable to assume he stole the story from somewhere, but whoever it was, was almost certainly dead. If nothing else, Cameron has learned to keep his thievery to the corpses. I enjoyed the movie, and like Dr. Frankenstein, before him, it became obvious to me, that Cameron did not understand the forces he was working with or what his movie is really about. It’s not an environmental allegory, it’s about how a sentient creature deals with a space borne viral infection. The creature is the planet, the invading infection, human beings.
Here it helps to know a little about two kinds of evolution as defined by Darwin, Natural and Artificial Selection. In short, Natural selection is what you see in nature all the way down to the virus, Artificial Selection is what you see at the grocery store – something that directly bares the influence of man. In the movie, the blue people are unique in they are four limbed, while all the other species are six limbed. Here on earth, the reason, mammals, reptiles, birds(I know, redundant), have the same basic physiology and anatomy, is they share the same common ancestor. Now if you subscribe to universal Darwinism(the back story of my Memes War) the blue skins must have six limbs, or they have been subject to artificial selection, to make them more like the infection, AKA human beings. It’s reasonable to assume the blue skins were only recently and artificially evolved, for a variety of reasons, including the tail – kinda-like ol’ Darth, back in the day when Star Wars was only one movie.
Here on earth, virus’s and bacterial infections are known to affect the behavior of their host – coughing in the face and so on. Behavior can also be radically changed by infection, in short, while it is true, Avatar does indeed follow the plot lines of Dances with Wolves and Pochahauntis, the science behind it, has more in common with 30 Days Later, and a slew of other zombie movies that get the science right. The hero is the infection that is selected out and turned back on its own kind – that’s how viral immunology works – meaning your corner flu shot. Maybe there was something in the cigarettes (and second hand smoke) that were preventing the scientist from being turned into a flu shot themselves.
So with Evolutionary biology front and center, let’s take another look at How to be Popular. This isn’t a comedy, it isn’t uniquely American, it’s an accurate portrayal of a knock down battle for human social status that every member of the human species engages in every day. It ain’t no joke and it helps to know one of the leading candidates for the evolution of verbal language has to do with the spread of gossip. It’s that important to our survival. The popular elite are so much entertainment, but “conformity enforcers,” meaning determiners of how the group acts as a whole.
First we need to re-examine Abrahamic fantasy, which again fail to accurately define our species – “The Papa” as Tevia proclaims in Fiddler in the Roof, in truth is in charge of nothing. It’s the Grandmothers who run the show with their grand-daughters. In other words, the mother and father aren’t the foundation of the family unit. It has to do with our evolutionary history – basically if the mom and dad are both gone for whatever reason, a female child with a nursing grandmother has an increased chance of survival. Popular does demonstrate this, there are no adults to break up the attack of the unpopular kid on the school yard, so the most popular girl performs an act of altruism. Only she had that kind of power – in short she decided how the group would treat its members. This probably is how it worked in our ancestral species. And there is nothing funny about.
Consider the fate of the previous most popular girl, she went the opposite route, said unkind things about some of the girls and paid the ultimate price, complete social expulsion (shunning). In a world where everyone is directly responsible for the survival of everyone else, as is seen in still existent, egalitarian hunter-gather societies, this is a death sentence.
This is another example of where Abrahamics get it wrong, human beings are kind to one another, despite their religion. The reason the girl cemented her popularity, was because she learned how to use her power wisely – meaning not acting dumb and coming to the aid of those less powerful who deserve saving. The boy being pummeled hadn’t done anything majorly wrong – he probably tried to join in the game, much as she had done at the hot tub, but he screwed up somehow. She removes him from the group to lick his wounds and return another day. (In game theory, this strategy – tit for tat (punish), but forgive, has been demonstrated as being more evolutionary stable than the “nuclear option” of her predecessor. The former Miss, Popular, would have cheered the other boys on – which is why she is now history, and banished from the group.
It is also important to understand, biologically speaking 15 year old girls are biologically ready to reproduce(see David Buss’s global study) and an eighth girl is almost, but not quite that age. So by being nice, she gets a leg up for having the best mate choice(s)- we are a mildly polygamous species after all. The other girl, pretty though she may be, is pre-selected as school slut, she’s going to have to have sex with anyone who wants her to raise her popularity.
It is very easy to see how being kind to one another is a survival advantage. The kindest girl becomes the most popular girl, thus getting the best genes, which also leads to prettiness. There is a positive feed-back loop (it’s called run away selection and is why grandmothers are more important than parents.
The reason I compare Popular to Avatar isn’t to damn either movie, both are great movies, but neither movies are what they say they are, Avatar isn’t an allegory, its natural selection at its most basic, one species going toe to toe with another in the “struggle for existence.”
Popular isn’t a comedy, Mean Girls, which borrows from the same NYTimes article, is a comedy, Legally Blonde, is a comedy, and both get the science (evolutionary psychology) right but the women are older and of reproductive age. The film makers just don’t get it (it has to with the evil they were taught in school – I went there too.) Compare my scene, where Job tells Hell his wife has died and Hell sets Job up for a vicious joke, “If my wife, I don’t know what I’d do,” “You are married?” No, you know what they say, if it flies, floats, or fucks, it’s cheaper to rent.” It doesn’t get more ugly or inhuman than that. It’s funny, because there is enough emotional distance that people can recognize Mr. Hell as a universal asshole. Ultimately, Job’s failure to get up right then and take another seat is what doomed him. If Job came up to me and explained what just happened, I’d take his seat and I have no doubt a plane full of people would do the same.
That is exactly what happened on Sept. 11 when a plane full of people rallied and sacrificed their lives. The popular girl was willing to sacrifice her power to come to the aid of the boy in distress. It’s what human beings do. It is how we evolved.
Compare Mr. Hell’s bit of ugliness with the one boy who actually is about the right age (unlike the leads) happily explaining who the most popular girl is. He is taking pride in her success, not just because it is in his own self interest to say so, because the most popular girl in their school really is a very good person. So what does he get as his reward, the lower third, “not popular.” Why do that to kid who is working to be accepted in the group?
It’s actually worse than Hell’s mocking Job’s grieving widow, because if you go back to the NYTimes article, this is a work of non-fiction, some kid actually said sincerely that and was then portrayed as a fool. Popular is that ugly. Where’s the funny in that?
I think How to be popular does work, the film makers basically shot the article, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/08/magazine/how-to-be-popular.html?scp=1&sq=how%20to%20be%20popular&st=nyt&pagewanted=3 which is why it belongs in the documentary, or maybe the drama competition, technically it is a docudrama, that they think they made a comedy would be hilarious, if it weren’t so tragic.
